The Jezebel

by Dylan Allen

  Walls Come Tumbling Down

  Regan

  “When you punish a child for telling the truth, you teach them to lie.” That was one of my grandfather’s most common refrains. I stare unseeing at his undisturbed, meticulously arranged desk and wonder what else he taught me but didn’t really believe.

  He made me think he loved me. He made me think I could trust him. And because I was so desperate for a loving father figure, I didn’t ask questions that I should have. I just… followed his rules and gave whatever he asked of me.

  Even when it cost me everything.

  In the week since Remi’s bombshell about our father’s disappearance and the role my grandfather played in it, I’ve been plagued by something deeper, more corrosive than guilt. There are huge fissures in my consciousness.

  I can’t change any of it. I can’t disown my family and as far as I’m concerned at the most basic level, we’re all victims of one person’s God complex. But, if Matty could see it, that means I chose not to.

  I came to the belly of the beast today, not even sure what I was looking for. I don’t know what, if anything at all, from all those years ago would even be here.

  So far, I’ve looked through the filing cabinets built into the desk. But there’s nothing, at least nothing that means anything to me. My mother has only let the cleaning lady in here to dust and vacuum since he died.

  The book he was reading the morning he had his stroke lays open on the wood lacquered side table next to his dark brown leather recliner.

  I don’t even know what I’m looking for. But there’s no one left to ask. Dan, his assistant, retired to Costa Rica, the year my grandfather died and hasn’t responded to the email I sent him. I want to have some answers before I call Matty. Or maybe, I’m just putting it off because I don’t know how to apologize for the wrong I’ve done.

  I shove away from his desk and walk over to the bookshelf, where dozens of sterling silver frames line the shelves, with as much prolificacy as the books they were built to house.

  Most of the photos are of him and me. There’s only one of him with my father. I used to think it was because he found looking at him painful. The truth of it makes bile rise in my throat. I pick up the picture and look at it through this new lens. It’s from the day of my father’s high school graduation. I run a finger over my father’s broad, handsome smile. Remi, minus the blue eyes, is his spitting image.

  I wish I’d known him. So much so now that I know that he was brave enough to do what I haven’t been able to - choose his happiness over everything else. And in letters he left for Remi, ones that Gigi has held on to all these years, he said he was coming back for us. Was it selfish of him to leave us? Yes. But it’s not like he left us in a ditch to die. Not the way his own father did to him.

  He may have loved Gigi, but he loved us too. And he would have been there for us if my grandfather hadn’t seen to it that he wasn’t.

  I drag my eyes to the face of the other man in the picture.

  Emotions batter my chest with the blunt force trauma of a steel-toe boot. I can’t believe the man who raised me so gently, who plucked me out of trouble, who literally saved my life, could do the things that we know for certain he did.

  His smile is full of a smug pride that he always wore when one of us accomplished something. He saw them as his accomplishments, too.

  I start to put the silver framed photo back on the shelf when the shadow of something on his wrist catches my eye. My chest tightens like it’s been placed in a vice grip and I grasp the edge of the bookshelf to steady myself.

  I bring the picture closer to my face.

  There’s a tattoo on his wrist.…one that wasn’t there when I was growing up.

  A flaming blue lightning bolt.

  Like the ones on the wrists of the men who held me down while my body was used in ways that transformed my very soul. Like the one above the nightclub where his assistant was seen by Matty and Jack.

  I barely make it to the bathroom before I lose the contents of my stomach.

  In the last few years of his life, when he couldn’t do it for himself, I dressed him. I fastened the burgundy leather straps of his Piaget watch to his wrist every single morning. There was nothing but his smooth, freckled, freakishly unwrinkled skin in the space underneath it. It didn’t even leave a scar. Or was it just that I wasn’t looking?

  Because, there it is. Clear as day on the wrist of the arm he has slung over my father’s shoulder.

  Before I know what I’m doing, I raise the frame over my head and slam it down with as much force as I can gather and nearly howl with satisfaction when it shatters.

  I spent my whole life without a father. I was distinctly aware of what I was missing by growing up without him.

  And to know that the man who pretended to offer me succor was the one responsible for my sorrow - My rage is going to burn me alive and I want to let it. I want to burn away my old life, my old hurts, my old mistakes and start over.

  Blindly, I grab one frame after the other and smash them, too. There isn’t a single memory here that deserves to be preserved.

  Suddenly, I’m engulfed by a pair of arms and the scent of Chanel No. 5.

  I sink into her, let her body cocoon me, and let the frame I’m holding slip out of my grasp and lay my head on her breast, and even though she hates tears, I let them fall. Because goddammit, she owes me.

  “Shhhh, Reggae Queen…” she calls me by the name she used to, before she started hating us all. That thought makes her arms feel like restraints, and I struggle to break free of her.

  She lets me go with an “Oomph,” and I realize I’ve elbowed her in the side.

  I meet her wide-eyed stare with an incendiary glare. “Why didn’t you protect me when it actually mattered? It’s too late. You knew what he did, and you let him get away with it.”

  I expect her to slap me. Or maybe even punch me. Tina Wilde does not suffer insubordination, and she certainly didn’t let it go unpunished.

  She just bows her head and nods in a silent, but clear confession, and shock completely stunts my rage.

  But when she says, “I’m sorry,” My guard goes up.

  My eyes dart around this room. “Is this some sort of set up? Why are you apologizing?”

  She props a hand on her hip and spears me with a glare of consternation. “Can’t I just be sorry?”

  “You never have been before,” I point out, my eyebrows raised, daring her to contradict me.

  She looks at the ceiling and shakes her head. “Father save me, you are such a pain in the ass, Regan.” She stalks to my grandfather’s desk and pulls a cigar out of the humidor. I know she keeps them freshly stocked for when she hosts meetings and parties here. She picks up a silver -handled trimmer and expertly clips the end.

  “Here,” she says and hands me one.

  I stare at her. “You smoke?”

  She rolls her eyes and presses the cigar into my hand. She takes a curling pull of hers, before she sits down. She tilts her head, as her dark eyes assess me. I have to stop myself from straightening my clothes and my hair and sit down. She hands me the cutter and lighter. As if I’d know what to do with them.

  I drop the foul-smelling cigar on the small table beside my chair.

  “You can be angry and break things. You deserve to. It was a terrible thing we did to you.”

  “Are you just saying that because we caught you? You said you never would have told us.”

  “I meant it. Why would I want you to know the truth?”

  “Wow, so you think it was right to tell us that our father was dead, when you knew he wasn’t?”

  “I didn’t know he wasn’t. It wouldn’t have changed anything, and you would have been in danger, too.” She takes a pull from her cigar and turns to gaze around the room.

  She’s made quite a recovery since the last time I saw her.

  I drove her home from Remi’s house the day all of this came out. She and Gigi had a confrontatio
n that turned physical. She’d been nearly catatonic with grief. And I forgave her in that moment. She may have kept his secrets, but she was my grandfather’s victim, too. After her husband left her for another woman. My anguish felt like a trickle compared to the monsoon of it that roiled in her. Without her asking me to, I forgave her for the lifelong lie.

  “Actually, I would have done something different,” she muses. “I wouldn’t have married a man thinking somehow I was going to be the making of him. No one makes anyone but themselves. And people don’t change unless they want to.” My emotions are in turmoil and I want to shake the cool, unruffled expression off my mother’s face.

  “I thought you were going to say, I wouldn’t have raised my children in the same house as the man who tried to murder their father. How could you live with him? Knowing that he’d tried to have his own son killed? And how could you watch us grieve for a man who wasn’t dead.”

  “Your grandfather was a dangerous, wicked man. But he loved you and your brothers. If I’d tried to take you away from him, he would have killed me. I was worried that if any of you disappointed him, he’d hurt you, too. So, I cracked a whip on your backs to keep you safe.”

  “Why didn’t you let me go to Wellesley?” I ask.

  She looks startled and then pensive. She opens her mouth and closes it twice before she finally answers me. “That’s where Gigi went to school. It’s where she met your father.” Mom admits with a deep sigh as if admitting it is a weight off.

  “Wow. So, that’s why you didn’t let me go?” I rear back – surprised how much empathy is mingled with my incredulity.

  My mother’s expression clears, and she lifts her chin as if I’ve offended her. “I would have let you go, Regan. You kids had already paid so much for his sins. And by then, I knew he’d never been mine to lose, in the first place.” She takes another draw from her cigar and blows a smoke ring.

  “So then…why?”

  “The same reason as everything else. Your grandfather forbade it. He only let Remi go because unlike you, Remi could afford to pay his way.”

  She leaves out that it’s because the men in my family all got access to their inheritance when they were eighteen. I had to wait until I was thirty.

  “So, he lied about that, too. And made you take the blame…” That hurts more than it should. Especially, when in the grand scheme of things, it’s the least of his crimes against me.

  My mother shrugs it off. “Oh yes. You were his pet. He couldn’t bear to be the bad guy in your eyes. And even though he never expressed remorse for what he did to Lucas, he thought he’d gain some redemption in raising the three of you. And I let him because I knew that as long as he loved you and as long as you followed his rules, you’d be safe. But I hated how close you were…when you and I were at such odds.

  Before I can ask, she starts speaking again.

  “I should have turned Liam in. I was barely old enough to buy liquor, with three very young children, a violent and cunning father in law, a broken heart, a shattered ego, and a business to run. And I didn’t have a soul to confide in about the worst thing that had ever happened to me.”

  She takes a puff of her cigar and blows an expert smoke ring. It’s like she’s speaking from my heart.

  In that moment, I see my mother in an entirely new light. She’s always been this fearless, unstoppable, resilient, tough as nails, bitchy-as-fuck, hard ass. She’s successful, flawlessly composed, so utterly capable that I forgot, that she's also just a woman. Flesh and bone and with a heart as prone to pain as mine.

  I’ve had challenges, but nothing like what she has overcome. I don’t think I’d make the same choices as her.

  But I can’t say for sure.

  The night my daughter was born, I lay awake all night with her in my arms, making promises and vows I’d longed to hear my whole life.

  I’ve kept all but one – that I would never lie to her. The first time she asked me about her father’s frequent nights away while we were still living in Paris, I lied. And I continued to for years because I didn’t want her to know who her father – and mother – really were.

  My mother stares sightlessly in my direction. The cigar dangles from her long elegant, bejeweled fingers and she looks every inch the titan she is. Can I really judge her not wanting to tell me her truths? Especially when the stakes were so high.

  It’s only been three months since I last saw Stone and I can barely breathe for missing him.

  She’s spent 32 years without my dad. She’s dated, being Lucas Wilde’s widow is part of her identity. I can’t imagine how she’ll handle things when his return becomes public knowledge.

  “Do you still love dad?”

  “You still love your grandfather?” She retorts in a slightly defensive tone, one eyebrow raised in challenge.

  “I don’t know.” It’s the closest thing to the truth I can manage. I’m still trying to reconcile my memories of the man I thought I knew with the evil I’m confronting.

  “I shudder to think of all of the secrets shared with him and kept from me,” she grimaces.

  I scoff. “Until I find a way to top ‘your father’s not really dead,’ you might be setting yourself up for a pot and kettle comparison, by calling me secretive.”

  “Touché. Not much worse than that,” she concedes, waving one hand in the air, as if she’s giving a testimony.

  Not much worse, but there are things equally awful. I look over at the pile of glass, chrome, and pictures and think of secrets that brought me here today.

  “What was that tattoo on his wrist?” I watch her closely for any flickers of recognition or surprise.

  She looks at me askance and that one-sided frown of annoyance is a relief. She considers herself a connoisseur of information and not knowing something always annoys her. “What tattoo? Be more deliberate with your words, girl,” she snaps.

  I point at the pulse point on my wrist and trace a thunderbolt. “Pops had one.”

  She waves my words off. “He didn’t have a tattoo on his wrist. You know that.”

  I walk over to the mess I made and sift through the glass with the toes of my shoe, until I get to the first frame I smashed. I pluck the photo off the backing and hand it to her. “Yes, he did at one point.”

  She puts the cigar down and takes the picture from me. She scrutinizes it closely and frowns. “What the hell is that?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ve seen them on other… people,” I tell her.

  She puts the picture on the settee next to her. “What other people?” Her voice is hard, but her eyes…aren’t. She looks afraid, but there’s also a vengeful light, a slight curl to her lips, that remind me of a wolf’s snarl.

  I know that I’m not the one she wants to hurt. But now that I’m a mother myself, I know that I’m about to break her heart beyond repair.

  I haven’t told anyone this story. I haven’t wanted to relive it. It’s the monster that lives under my bed. But I’ve done my mother a great disservice in keeping it from her. So, I gather my courage and sit down.

  “I need to tell you something.” I take her hand in mine and start from the night in the bakery when Stone stabbed Weston.

  “Dan? That sycophantic little fucker, I never liked him.” She’s been stoic, her eyes flickering with rage and anguish, but completely silent. But now she stands, pacing the way I do when I’m agitated.

  “Well, he was involved, but he’s been gone for ten years.”

  She stops pacing and taps a finger to her lips. All signs of distress she was feeling have been replaced with intense focus. “What was his connection to this Weston scumbag?” She starts pacing again, talking more to herself than to me. “I mean…how could Liam have known you were there?”

  “He said he had a tracker on my car.”

  “No, he didn’t.” She makes it sound like the most absurd thing she’d ever heard.

  “It didn’t?” I ask around a hiccup.

  “No. He must have known that
boy, that house. Where’d you say it was, Palestine?”

  “Yes.”

  She sits back down and cups my face, with achingly tender yet, commanding hands.

  “Where is this man? This Weston?” She says his name like it’s a curse. Her midnight eyes glitter like exploding galaxies.

  “Pops told us he was dead. Killed in the raid that set us free. And when that girl was arrested, the news reports said he was missing, and presumed dead.”

  She grimaces with disgust and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Well, then we must assume that he is in fact alive. And we must find him. We’ll have to do it on our own, because we can’t be sure whoever helped him isn’t still on the police force.”

  Fear and loathing coil in my stomach. I shake my head violently. “No, no, no, I can’t do that.” I never want to see him again. Not ever. “And if he isn’t dead, then where’s he been all these years?” The idea of him lurking in the shadows makes me dizzy with fright.

  My mother grabs my shoulders and gives me a firm shake. I look up into her dark, terrifyingly cold eyes. “We need to be sure. I can handle that part of the plan. You need to focus on the rest.”

  I look at her askance. “The rest of what?”

  She continues talking, as if she didn’t hear me. “I need to find out more about these blue thunderbolts. Whatever he was a part of, we need to make sure it’s completely dismantled.” She claps her hands impatiently at me and rises to her feet. “We’ve got work to do. Why are you just sitting there like a bump on a log?”

  “Because I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I shake my hands in exasperation.

  She rolls her eyes impatiently. “Keep up, child. I’ll hunt for this man, and you must finally leave your husband.”

  I choke on the shocked gasp the word hunt drew from me and do a double take at her. “What did you say?”